Like Temptation

Christmas does not just knock on the door,
but presses on the doorbell until you respond
and leaves messages for you on your answerphone
for you to respond to whoever you faintly connect with.

We can escape, to where the season of goodwill 
has no reach. A true holiday, away from it all,
would be to stay in an Islamic country,
as long as you are comfortable with
their police state/human rights record. 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita - Pictures Of Birds

Stork, Maguar stork, as created in 1914 
by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944)

'Parakeets' as created in 1927 by
Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944) 

'Heron in a Cage' as created in 1915
by Dutch artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita,
lest we forget a man who died in Auschwitz.

Galah cockatoo. or Roseate cockatoo,,
as presented in this lino cut style drawing
by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, this is one
of many works rescued from the home of the 
ailing Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita by
his pupil M. C. Escher and others immediately
after the arrest of Mesquita, his wife and son
by the Nazi invaders of Amsterdam. 

Watchfulness Lapses

In flat times when the news cycle slows 
to linger on old stories rather than spike
and peak with changes that come around
like perennials, the same time every year.

As the media aligns with peaks in the cycles
of popular consumerism, as if by itself
us buying more stuff would warm us more in winter 
than it does any other season I can't help but think
as we endure the flatness of the news  we must try harder
to resist lapsing from the levels of watchfulness
with which we attempt to care about for the rest of year. 

Testing Times

In the present history of mass entertainment
nothing is bigger than the games industry,
whether financially, or whether in terms
of the number of programmers it employs.
Gaming dwarfs television, film and live music
combined. All to produce ever more 'realistic'
and enticing images out of electricity, meant
to make the viewer forget they are manufactured,
particularly when they use human likeness
but invent different worlds that are run by rules
that nobody would dream of making a reality.

I don't play video games but I do 'get the point' of them,
when the mind is tempted to idle then it will idle,
but woe betide the mind that is pushed to idle too long,
and lets relationships slide to where 'there is nothing to do',
that is where the point of being who we are will be tested. 

Black Friday Special

On this day of peak sale
upon all-year-round nearly peak
sale of the year, the item
that is going cheapest is faith
in the commander chief
in 'the greatest democracy in the world',
and 'the greatest economy in world', the USA.

Where as age increasingly shrinks
all previous perceptions of competence
and the generosity of the country
all the commander in chief can do
is berate the logic and reasoning
of those who question his memory.  

My First Advent Card of 2025

'Sartartia' as painted in 1985 by American artist Valerie Jaudon (born 1945).

 

Film Review - 'Testimony'

This documentary is 100% worth seeing. The film was built on a simple premise: Testimony is evidence, Evidence is what forms a legal case in a court. The film started with a shocking testimony. In 2003 The Catholic Church tried to sell what was soon proven to be a cemetery for a former mother and baby home in central Dublin to a developer, for them to build a hotel on the site. 

The last Magdalene Laundry was closed in November 1996. Across Ireland and outside Ireland the victims were presumed to 'statistical' and represented of a past that modern Ireland thought it could avoid. The victims were 'safe' and 'forgotten'. The shock was on the living victims, when in 2003 the Catholic Church sought to sell the plot of land which was discovered to be the graveyard of the former occupants of the Mother And Baby unit. To speed up the clearing of the land the Catholic Church found in it had record of the deaths of over 790 people for whom there were no burial records. The church proceeded to disinter the bones from the plot of land that was for sale, leaving the burial site of former nuns intact. Without regard to any possible relatives of those buried, the church cremate the bones, fill urns with the ash and reburied the ashes in impersonal site with little to say who was buried there. All with no notice given to those who might have been interested in those whose remains were so processed.

Admin around matters to do with death and burial would become a strong feature of the account of those anonymised by the grossly unfair characterisation of them, for the living survivors of Magdalene Laundries, the mothers separated from their children and those punished by incarceration/unpaid work. What stirred those living after time imprisoned to anger was how detached and secretive the Church was when it behaved the way it did.

From there onward, the film was a matter of the victims finding their voice, finding each other, and navigating the present day Ireland to retrieve what was left of the past that had mis-shaped them w when they found that they had no say in the matter of what shaped them. To find a voice they had to find intelligent allies. This they did and to retrieve the narrative was a long struggle that is still ongoing. First there were the young women who were shut up in the laundries late in their operation, who were kept doing laundry year on year. Then there were the babies sold in adoption schemes to rich Americans when money was the only point, but it was a point well hidden by a flummery about morality the did not withstand detailed examination. When the adopted children became adults and understood their adoption they were dissuaded by as much bluff and sincere dishonesty as could be generated by the nuns from from finding records of who their birth mothers were. Likewise mothers seeking children they unwillingly given up for adopting not knowing what money the Catholic Church made from the process, amongst many other things. 

Then there was the collection of the accounts of beatings and punishments issued by the monks and nuns, where even when the collection of the Testimony proved to be a critical mass as a body of evidence, the state would push back against witnesses individually where the Irish state's defence against accepting that the beatings was two fold 1-we would have to corroborate with the long dead nuns that they did it before we could believe you 2-even if the state accepts that it colluded with such cruelty then accepting that it did is not enough cause for a compensation scheme, which would need witnesses and paperwork from the Catholic Church for it to work. 

It was an enthralling film which often had me in tears, it was wonderfully well made. There were no clunky edits. I am sure the film could be the centre of a website that could expand and expand more. For example try https://jfmresearch.com/testimony/. The film stopped at ongoing matters, The website will explore further research of the subject. 

The point is the victims voices were recovered-most by the victims themselves and through the help on offer to them, which they were not expecting to find. The Irish state is still resistant to accepting it's role in colluding with the Catholic Church. I can guess the indifference shown to the public, by both the Irish State and The Catholic Church whilst legally each shielded the other, and tried to play off and divide public opinion to dilute the public's revulsion at the whole authoritarian and falsely moral edifice that The Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries represented.

P.s. I say this film was about the victims being seen to recover their voices. I want to mention this film's well intentioned opposite. 'The Magdalene Sisters', a 2002 fictional film made by actor/director Peter Mullan. It depicted three teenage girls trapped in the punishment/laundry system run by the nuns. I heard about it at the time but felt disinclined to go anywhere near the film when I found out how much those drawn towards it were drawn by the depiction of the violence by the nuns on the teenage girls who were looking for their way out. Recycling anger by drawing the public's attention to it might seem cathartic, but it will also leave more scars, for viewing it, than the process of exploring loss the way 'Testimony' does....   ....seeing faces creased by time and suffering, for waiting for the audience with which to be believed spoke most clearly to me.